Never Let Me Go
by Emmel1118
Summary: AU Time and again, fate decided that they couldn't have forever – and even then they were meant to be. Mark and Lexie through different time periods. Oneshot


_**A/N I'm not quite sure what this is... It was inspired by a Hunger Games fic I read a while back that I now can't remember the name of. **_

_**Also, I am no history expert, so I apologise if any of it is wrong. I can't speak French fluently either.**_

_**I hope you enjoy. :)**_

_Time and again, fate decided that they couldn't have forever  
– and even then they were meant to be._

_**Edinburgh - 1927**_

She's cold from the rain, soaked to the bone, in a city she doesn't know, far from home. But she's determined, she didn't drag herself all this way for nothing – no, she knows what she's doing.

Standing on the street corner, she stares up into the sky, at the dark clouds and the weak sunlight fighting to get through, and she just smiles. She's been waiting for this moment for a long time. She's carrying all her things, everything that she is, and carried on her shoulders is the hope of what, one day, she could be.

She starts down the street, the smile still on her face, and it's still there when she pushes open the doors of the Palace Theatre, the rain streaming down her face and he's standing there, his back to her.

It's there she first sees him. She watches him, as he works away at flickering, fading lights trying to return them to their former glory. She's content watching this stranger and his quick, nimble fingers and their attempts and trials to solve this perplexing problem, so much so that when he turns, she stumbles over her words.

He just waits, patiently, for her to finish – and she can see the mirth dancing in his eyes, before he shows her where to go. When he holds the door open for her, their eyes meet, and something changes within her.

This man with his charming smile and easy manner has done something to her and she's not quite sure what or if she'll ever know.

She comes out of the theatre glowing from ear to ear. He's still there, trying to fix the light. Maybe now he doesn't need to – her smile is far brighter than they ever could be.

...

She comes back two days later, for the first rehearsal, and the first thing she does when she gets there is look around for him. He's not there. She'd be lying if something didn't fall in her chest when she couldn't find him.

When it's all over, she looks again.

Even as she walks out, she's still _looking_.

He's not there.

...

A week passes, and every day she looks for the handsome stranger who showed her the way in. She tells herself it's because he was the first person in this new, cold city who showed her compassion, who smiled at her, that it can't be anything else.

But her heart knows differently.

...

They're running through a scene, and suddenly, there he is, paintbrush still tucked behind his ear, a mischievous smile on his face. They're eyes meet and she falters for a second, before picking herself up and continuing.

Later, when they've finished for the night, she finds him out the back.

He asks her name – says he never found out last time.

"Lexie," she tells him, and her face lights up again, the way it never did before she came here to this city.

"Mark," he replies.

She's always been a girl who thought about the consequences, about how her next decision could change everything. She's clever, she thinks about things.

But that night, she asks him to take her home and never for a second does she consider what might happen next.

...

The weeks pass, and the first performance creeps ever closer, and she becomes like a stranger in her own home and like a fixture in his. She doesn't plan it that way and neither does he, but both of them are powerless to say no when the other comes calling.

No one else knows. It's okay like that.

Sometimes he stares at her and she'll wonder how she ever lived without this, without him, but she can never find the words to tell him.

She's scared, scared at how quickly this has happened.

So at night, sometimes, when he tells her he loves her more than anything and she knows he's speaking the truth, she acts for him, putting on a performance, doing the only thing she's ever been good at. Pretending.

Pretending she doesn't love him quite so much as she does.

She tells him he's being silly, that he can't be serious, that relationship like this never last, that no one ever falls in love like this. Society tells them that marriage is what comes first, not love, her mother told her that too, back when she was younger and ever even considered love affairs like this. But she ran away from home, from her mother, to take to the stage, and into the arms of a stranger. Her mother's words fade away in her head because they're not the truth and yet she finds them spilling out on her tongue.

But even as she tells him, she knows they are living in a society in flux, in changing times, that maybe the social regimens of the past just might be falling away.

...

The first night is the best night of her life. Rapturous applause, cheering, hundreds of eyes, dancing with happiness she has brought them. It's the reason she came here, to take to the stage and make people happy – it's the reason she left her home, to the horror of her mother she can safely assume, and came here, started a new life.

This is her chance. She was never supposed to settle here, to find someone like him and spend her nights curled up beside him. The Palace Theatre was supposed to be her chance to make it to London, to the big lights and money, and...

and what she naively used to think was happiness.

She thinks that maybe here, this is real happiness.

...

After the last performance, after the buzz fades away, a man comes up to her and he promises her everything she's ever dreamed. He tells her he thinks she's the best he's ever seen, that he's a playwright, from London, and that he wants her in his next play.

And even though she wants to say no, even though she wants to stay, wants to make her life here, with him, she says yes.

Because he's giving her everything she's ever dreamed and she doesn't understand that as time moves on your dreams can change.

The playwright tells her rehearsals for his new play start in two weeks.

...

She tries to convince herself that they were never meant to be – that there's someone else out there, in London, who she'll marry and fall in love with because she can't expect him to drop everything and follow her. They were a strange match in the first place, their lives intersecting at completely different points - they're from completely different worlds.

She's good at packing her things in the dead of night and leaving before anyone notices, she's done it before. She hasn't even been here that long.

But the more she tries to convince herself, the less she believes it.

...

She goes to see him the night before she leaves for London, crossing the city in the dead of night. She hasn't told him, hasn't been able to frame the right words at the right time, so that night she stands, frozen, in the doorway of his home, resolved to tell him.

But she can't.

He asks her to come in and she obliges. They spend the night together, him with eyes lit up with happiness, her trapped between enjoying the moment and agony at the realisation at what tomorrow will bring.

It's the chance of a lifetime, it's her dream. She can't give it up for a stagehand from the wrong side of the town and good few years too old, can't chance it all on a man she barely knows and who might break her heart.

But for one night, she _pretends_, and sometimes, when the shadows of commitment and the future fall away a little, the joy that lights up his eyes is shared by hers too.

...

By morning, she's gone.

...

_**France – 1918**_

When the guns of war rang out what seems to be decades ago now, he never could have guessed at what would happen to him. He just wanted to serve his country.

He thought it would be fun, would be a lark. So did all of them. All the boys on his cricket team joined up, all together, a few days after war was declared – Derek, Jackson, Owen, Alex, all of them.

Now he's the only one left. The mud and the bullets have swallowed everyone else, taken them from this world and into the next.

And sometimes, when the mud's up to the tops of his boots and slowly seeping its way inside, and the shells are falling and the sound of gunfire is all he can hear and he knows that soon, that the gas will start rolling towards them and he's trying to sleep, he wishes he was dead too.

...

The front line never moves, he's learnt. He's been here for a long time now, he knows that they never move, that they shell the enemy, they get shelled back, some general somewhere that's not here tells them they have to go over. They follow the orders. In the early hours on the next morning, he crawls back into the trench he left the day before, more of his friends dead and wondering why he's still not joining them.

Someone called him lucky once. He just laughed in his face. This lucky? No bloody way.

...

Someone seems to realise that he's been here far too long and him and his platoon get sent away from these god forsaken holes in the earth. He knows that soon, he'll be back.

But for now, he savours the moment, as he walks away from the stench of death and the memories that come with it.

...

They go to a camp near a town. There's a field hospital here and with it comes the reminder they're not quite as far from the death and the shooting as the silence seems to suggest.

The first night, after their drills, after their trip to see the doctor, they're allowed into the town. The first thing they realise is that all the soldiers are gathered in one place. He'd be stupid not to join them.

He orders beans and eggs and sausages. He eats hungrily, knowing that the sausage is probably not sausage and that the beans taste like they've been sitting in a can for near on decades, but he still wolfs it down.

Afterwards, the waitress comes over and asks him in broken English if he wants a beer. He doesn't speak. She's far too beautiful. Something happens in his chest that he doesn't have the words to describe.

"Sir?" she says, stumbling over the foreign words. "You like a beer?"

He doesn't say a word, he can't because he knows that if tries to speak he'll stumble over his words just the same as he would if they were a different language.

She shakes her head at him, impatient, before walking away, moving to a table obviously not tongue-tied. They wolf whistle at her, yelling and clamouring, and he suddenly feels angry. This is not how a woman should be treated. They may have been out here, at war, for a long time, but surely they haven't forgotten their manners.

One of the men sitting near him makes a dirty joke about her. Years ago, back with the cricket team, after a few beers at the pub, it would have been him cracking the dirty jokes, but now, after all the death he's seen, he fails to find the funny side.

He stands suddenly and leaves. He's had enough.

...

The next night, she's there again, serving. Everything's the same – the wolf whistles, the yells, the dirty jokes – and again he's had enough. Sitting in his pocket is a soggy cigarette, swapped with someone for something hours ago and promptly forgotten about. He thinks that now is maybe a good time to have a smoke.

He stands outside the front of the building and smokes, enjoying the taste of home, of the past, even if it is a little soggy.

Then the waitress comes outside, collecting glasses that have been haphazardly been left on the tables. He suddenly feels compelled to apologise to her.

"It's the war," he says, and she pauses in her duty. "It makes them animals." She turns and looks at him, giving him a tight smile.

"We are all animals underneath, no, soldier boy?" she asks, quietly, after a moment. "The war, it brings out the bad in us all." It's then he realises that her English is much better than he gave her credit for.

"Solider boy?" he asks, an eyebrow raised. He's certain he's older than her, by many years. She looks barely out of her teens, whilst he was twenty six when he joined up, all those years ago.

"Do not tell me you're not a boy. You are all boys." She pauses for a second and flashes him another small smile. "If it helps, you are no animal, soldier boy."

It does help.

...

He doesn't out the next night, because he falls asleep writing a letter to his mother at home.

...

When he wakes, in the early hours of the morning, he can't cope in the stuffy tent so he steps outside and goes for a walk.

He's walking along the river when he hears a voice calling out,

"Hey, soldier boy." He turns and sees the waitress walking behind him, like he knows she will be. "The stars are beautiful." He hadn't noticed the stars until she mentions them and then he looks up at them.

"Yes, yes they are."

...

When he gets back to the camp, he wishes that he never has to leave, but that morning, his CO tells him that the next day will be they're last.

He watches the leaves fall from the trees and realises that he doesn't want to let her go.

...

The next day, the last day they have left here, before the return to the front, he goes to see her in the morning. She's out the back, cleaning glasses, but he finds her.

He asks her to wait for him. To wait until this dreadful war is over and then give him a chance. That he likes her.

It's then that she tells him her name.

"When you come back, you ask for Lexie."

"You'll be waiting?"

"I'll be waiting." He turns to leave, but she speaks again, in French this time, quietly. "Je t'aime, soldier boy."

He doesn't know what she said, but he can make a good guess.

...

They go back to the front early the next morning. Back to death and destruction and pain and memories.

The days start stretching into weeks, but just when he loses all hope that he'll ever see her again, a message comes through on the radio.

At eleven o'clock, the hostilities will end.

The war's over.

...

His CO lets him go back to the town – but only for a few hours – in the joy that follows the announcement. He hasn't forgotten his deal. He wants to see her again, to ask her to marry him. The war's over, he's not going to die and that realisation makes him see that he loves her.

He gets to the bar, where a young boy is clearing glasses from the outside tables.

"Lexie, I'm looking for Lexie," he asks. The boy doesn't really seem to understand put points him through to the back and he hurries through. An older man stands behind the bar, and he frowns when Mark enters, seeing his uniform. "Lexie?" he asks. The man's frown deepens, and he can see sadness in the man's eyes.

"You're too late." He doesn't understand. Then he sees the ghosts in the man's eyes and suddenly, he does. "She was down by the river, a shell." The man shrugs, but Mark has seen the hurt in his eyes and realises that this man is most probably her father, now probably numbed by drink. "I told her not to go down there, but she says no – I'm waiting for solider boy, she said."

Mark feels numb too, without the drink. This can't be happening.

"So solider boy existed then." Mutely, he nods. "Well you're too late."

He turns and walks out. He should have expected this. Everyone else died on him, why not her?

...

He goes back to England, back to the village with no cricket team now, and in time, he marries a womanfrom down the road, the woman his mother always wanted him to before he went off to war. It's one of the only things that has stayed the same. He certainly hasn't.

They have children, he grows old. He never talks about the war, never talks about her.

It's easier like that.

...

_**Idaho Springs – 1860**_

She stumbles down the path, her clothes sticking to her sweaty skin. It's dark and her eyes can't pierce the black. The stars are a blanket above her, but they don't help her in knowing which direction to go. She lost track of direction even before the sun set, hours ago, sometime around when she ran out of water.

Water.

She can taste it on her tongue, the metallic tang and sweet relief if gives to your burning throat. It might be dark but it doesn't give her any respite from the heat. She's sweltering – she's forgotten how it felt to be cool, to feel shade.

Her mind starts to wander, back the wreckage she left behind, back to all the people she's left behind to bake in the sun, without proper burials, and it nearly pulls her heart to pieces.

She wanted to bury them but she didn't have the time, the energy, the will-power to bury her family in the dusty earth, so they stayed where they fell, crumpled little heaps that will haunt her for the rest of her life.

She's the only one left.

She's the only one alive.

Her heart feels like it's going to explode. Black spots appear in her vision.

The world slips sideways and then it starts moving – quick, slow, quick, slow – before it comes to a standstill. The stars have moved now, because instead of being above her, they're to the left; blinking spots on the horizon, calling out to her.

Everything fades to black, as if it wasn't already.

...

He finds her when he goes out to fetch water. She's lying on the tough ground, just behind his topsy-turvy shack. He wants to leave her, to let her be someone else's problem, someone else's burden, but as he creeps nearer, just to check she's not dead, her eyes flicker open. "They're all dead," she croaks, her throat sounding like sandpaper, before she passes out again.

He can't leave her now.

...

She wakes up again after he's carefully carried her into his home and settled her into his bed. She just looks at him, her pale, drawn face peering at him in the morning half-light. He brings her water, knowing her throat must be hell.

"Thank you," she murmurs, after taking a greedy gulp. "Thank you."

He wants to ask what happened to her, how she ended up half-dead outside his home. She doesn't look like a gold digger, but he's learnt by now that that's no real help. He thinks she's more likely to be a homesteader - way, way off course. He knows the journey from the East is long and arduous, he knows because he made, years and years ago, with his own family as a young lad, ten years previous. He also knows it's dangerous, with many perishing on the way over. Three women and a young boy died on Mark's journey. He remembers their faces, pale and drawn – extremely similar to the face belonging to the woman lying in his bed.

A knock sounds at his door but he doesn't go. He's still watching the girl. He thinks she's fallen asleep again. When he's sure she has, he finally goes to the door.

...

It's on the fourth day he finds out what happened. He was right about her being a homesteader, travelling with her family and others. Illness got some of them, surprise winter storms half of the rest, a buffalo stampede miles and miles away got everyone else, including all of her family. She was the only one who survived; she stumbled for hours through the sun and ended up here.

He can tell it's hard for her to explain about the tragedy that has befallen her, so that when she's finished, he doesn't ask a single question. He respects her privacy.

...

In return for her story, she manages to get his out of him. He came across with his family ten years ago. When gold was discovered, his father went out to mine it, searching for a fortune that never came. As soon as he was old enough, Mark followed him out to the mining villages, searching for gold that, deep down, he knew he was never going to find – unlike his father, who always seemed convinced his big haul was just around the corner. His father was killed in accident two years later.

He moved around the west, searching for purpose instead of gold after that. He was a cowboy for a while, before finding Idaho Springs and deciding to settle here. It was a spur of the moment thing, he admits.

...

Days stretch into weeks, and weeks into months; and never does he ask her to leave and she never asks why he lets her stay. They get used to each other, to their own particular rhythms and characteristics. To start with, he sleeps on the floor, but neither of them say a word when one night, he climbs into bed and holds her.

After all that's happened to the two of them, it just feels natural.

...

Winter comes and passes, spring comes into bloom.

A man visits them one last night in May. He and Mark talk for hours, while she does the washing and cooks, giving the two old friends time together. Finally, the man leaves, but the news he has brought causes shadows to move into Mark's eyes. She notices. He says he'll explain.

He does, three days later, when she returns from an outing to all this things packed outside their home. He's not out front, nor inside.

She finds him out the back, sitting on the dust, on the exact spot he found her all those months previous.

He explains about the war, about how he must go, must fight.

She doesn't want to let him go, but in the end, she relents, when she sees how firmly his mind is made up. It means something to him, so she lets him go.

He promises he'll come back.

...

And he does, two years later, in a coffin.

...

Years later, the man who came to visit them that night, the night he decided to fight a war that killed him, returns. She's sitting outside the front, rocking back and forth. She recognises him immediately.

She calls out into the half-sunlight, but she doesn't address the stranger. "Darling, come outside." A little boy scampers out of the house and instantly, the man knows that the tragedy that befell this woman did not just end with having the man she loved never come home alive.

"I think this man is going to tell us stories about you father."

...

_**London – 1904**_

She sits completely still, as her mother goes on and on in the corner – about how, now, she is of age and that she will marry whoever is most suitable; that she must rid herself of all her childish, silly notions that marriage is about love, and not suitability, not about bettering oneself's station in life.

She just smiles demurely, answering, that yes, of course she will marry exactly who her mother picks out for her, playing the part that her mother has cast for her. Her mother accepts her ascent without question, believing instantly that her second daughter will be easier to control than her first.

She smiles again, knowing that her mother trusts her, but her mind wanders, considering whether running off with the local blacksmith's son, like her sister Meredith did, would be preferable to spending the rest of her life with a bore, or a bully. She, not that she'd ever speak it out loud, does not care much for her mother and her beliefs of suitably and class.

It's only hypothetical, _of course. _She's not as fearless as her sister.

"I am so glad you have seen sense, my dear."

She smiles again, her glazed eyes telling a different story to what her mind is thinking.

What her mother doesn't know can't hurt her.

...

She sees him when she returns home from an outing to the local shops. He's tending to the weeds that have, recently, sprung up by the path that winds its way to their front door. She slows in her way, plucking an excuse out of thin air for her lingering, which her mother believes without a second thought, nodding and continuing up to the house.

She pauses the moment her mother disappears from view, stopping dead in the middle of the path. He stops in his work too, dropping his tools to the ground and turning to face her. She does not turn to look at him, but instead just enjoys the feel of his gaze on her.

"Later, when mother goes out. She's going to play bridge at the Carters." Even as she speaks, she does not turn her head, instead staring straight forward, wary of a stranger coming down the path and catching them.

It's always like this, they're both used to it – snatching moments here and there, rendezvous in the dead of night when will no one notice that they've gone missing. It's been happening for a while now, both craving more and yet knowing that everything that she has a hatred for – class, and suitability and her mother's approval – means that it can never be anything more. She is not as brave as her sister, cannot just take flight with the man that their mother would never let her marry.

No. This is all it will be, these rushed seconds together. All it will ever be.

And when her mother decides on who her husband will be and she leaves this place to join his family; that will be the end of it. There will be no declarations or heartfelt pleas, she made that clear the very first time. There will be no running away, no joining her sister where ever she ended up.

Because, no matter how much she hates herself for it, she _craves_ her mother's approval, even if her mother and her archaic views and ideas go against everything she wants as a person.

"Lexie," he says, quietly. A pair of kitchen maids appear at the top of the path, deep in their conversations, but instantly, she shuts down.

"Mr Sloan," she says curtly, walking away. She can feel his eyes on her until she turns the corner.

...

"You will make a beautiful wife, Alexandra," her mother announces, one crisp spring morning.

She nearly chokes on her tea.

_What her mother doesn't know can't hurt her._

_..._

Her mother finds a suitable man, from the right class.

A few weeks later, they're engagement is quietly announced in the back pages of the local newspaper.

...

They spend more and more nights together.

Mark has seen the newspaper, and yet doesn't say a word. There's nothing he can say. He doesn't plead, there are no heartfelt declarations.

But the whole time they are together, he can't take his eyes off her.

...

Her wedding day creeps ever closer. Her home is full of whispers - _what dress do you want, what flowers, what food _\- that she tries her hardest not to engage with. Her fiancé turns up at the house sporadically, and she paints a smile on her face and holds his hand and meets his eyes and dances with him as her mother looks on, her face a picture.

But ever night, now, she sneaks out, to their place, by the roses that he so tenderly grows, and they hold each other.

_What her mother doesn't know can't hurt her. _

But she can't hide it from herself and it hurts like hell.

...

The night before her wedding is a crisp, cool autumn evening. Instead of being asleep in bed, dreaming about her future with her husband, she is held in the arms of a man who isn't suitable, who isn't the right class, who her mother wouldn't approve of but who isn't a stranger.

...

She walks down the path, her mother and the maids flanking her.

He's clearing the weeds away again.

He watches her as she walks past, but she doesn't look.

...

The church is full.

She never sees it.

...

Her mother leaves her alone outside the church. She's wearing her white dress, feeling anything but pure. She closes her eyes, feels like crying.

Instead, she turns around and walks away.

...

He's still weeding the path when she returns.

He watches her as she walks towards him, confusion clear as day on his face.

_What her mother doesn't know can't hurt her. _

"Run away with me."

...

She's more like her sister than she gave herself credit for.

_**...**_

_**Manchester – 1957**_

It's been going on for far too long.

...

She knows his wife. She's flame haired, blued eyed, beautiful. They talk every so often. You could call them friends.

He knows her fiancé too. They work together.

That was how they met.

...

Sometimes, when they're lying side by side in some hotel room in the middle of nowhere when his wife is visiting her family and her fiancé is on a business trip, they forget about responsibilities and marriages, and the fact they're committing a sin, that they're being _unfaithful. _

But, always, when morning comes, they come back to earth with a bang.

...

It started one day when she went to office and Jackson wasn't there.

Mark was. They got talking.

It's not classy and it's not kind. They're betraying the very people that they are supposed to love.

And yet, every time one of them tries to put a stop to it, they can't. Something just pulls them back together.

Sometimes, when she's on the phone to her fiancé when behind her, Mark warms her bed; she wonders how they can't know. How they can be so blind as to not know?

Mark tells her they are careful, that no one ever has to know if they keep being careful.

...

She never asks him to leave his wife.

He never asks her not to marry her fiancé.

They never bother.

...

He's married. She's getting married.

Every time it comes back to her, in the morning, when they're lying next to each other, or she's lying in an empty bed next to no one, it hits her like a brick wall.

It hurts like hell

...

"_I'm going to be home a little late tonight, darlin'." _

Her fiancé falls away from her, piece by piece, a little every day.

"_There's just so much to do, darlin'."_

Sometimes she wonders if she really knows him at all.

"_If I want this promotion, I've got to stay a little longer, darlin'."_

She wants to scream at him that she doesn't want him to get promoted because, of course, it'll mean more work.

Instead, she picks up the phone and calls Mark.

"_He's not coming home soon, darlin'."_

_..._

Sometimes she wonders how no one knows. She walks down the street and feels like it's clear to see in her face.

She's a cheater. She's unfaithful. She's adulterous. She's betrayed him.

And yet, ever time, she picks up the phone and when she hears Mark's voice on the end of the line, she feels just a little bit better.

...

She's not doing this to hurt her fiancé, or his wife, she's doing it because she hates the loneliness.

She can't take another dinner eaten alone, hours after she cooked it, the cold food freezing her soul a little more every evening.

She's dying, slowly, being so alone.

Mark doesn't make her feel alone.

...

Her wedding day comes around. As she walks down the aisle she looks for him.

He's not there.

...

She always thought that after they got married, things would change. He'd stop working so hard and they'd spend more time together.

The opposite is true.

"_We need the money, darlin'."_

She's sick of it now. Sick of him and his excuses.

"_Just a little longer. Tomorrow I'll come home on time. I promise, darlin'." _

She knows his promises are empty, made to placate her and keep her happy.

"_I'm walking out the door, right now. I'm sorry I'm late, darlin'."_

After a few months, she realises that she lost the last part of him she had a long time ago.

...

She starts spending more time with Mark. He holds her and he's never late and he never makes excuses. He never lets her down.

It's such a pity he's married.

...

It's not planned and it's not expected, least of all by her.

A baby. A little girl with her father's eyes.

Not that anyone notices.

...

Now when her husband calls, his voice distant and, simply, a stranger's now, she doesn't let him get to his excuses, making them for him.

"_Let me guess, something just needs to be done?" _

She doesn't care. Her daughter makes things better. Makes her days have a purpose. Her daughter can't hate her, has to love her, and it's the first time in her life when she loves and it loved in return equally.

Except, maybe, it's the same with Mark, but that doesn't count, not really.

"_Let me guess, you're just coming out the door?"_

_..._

She fears the time when her daughter starts to grow up, when she starts school, moves out, meets a man, become independent.

When he daughter's gone, what will she do then?

...

He asks her time and time again.

"Is she mine?"

And every time, she says no, wishing she could say yes.

...

She grows older. Mark grows older. Her husband's excuses grow older.

Their daughter grows older

No one ever guesses.

...

She never asks him to leave his wife.

He never asks her to leave her husband.

They never bother.

...

It's been going on for far too long.

...

_**London - 2010**_

"Lexie," he asks, late one night, when a bottle of scotch is sitting between them, files are lying everywhere and they're both on the edge of exhaustion. "when did we stop being friends?"

"Sometime around when you broke my heart," she replies, coolly, turning over a piece of paper and scrawling her signature.

...

He never meant to hurt her, but he's always been crap at relationships. It's never really mattered before – when he broke a girl's heart in the past, he just moved on to the next one, but this time it's different.

He doesn't want to move on to the next one.

...

They came up against each other in court every so often. They'd always have fun when that happened, almost treating it as a game; who could out-fox the other. Sometimes they'd argue though, about a verdict or about dirty tactics, but they'd always make it up and by morning they'd be happy again.

Then he broke her heart and now when they're on the same case, they're only just civil. Her face is always a mask, and she hides behind it. In chambers, it's different, she lets herself go a little bit more, is a little looser with her comments, but she tries to avoid him there. There are nights, though, when they're the last two left, and they huddle in his office, sharing a bottle of scotch and silence, like before. But always, when she says it's time for her go and he says that maybe he should go too, he knows that in the morning, nothing will be different. She'll be back to avoiding him again by the time the sun comes up.

In court, however, she can't avoid him.

So she's civil and she doesn't get angry at him, not where others can see.

...

Then he gets offered the biggest case of his life. He accepts it without hesitation. The prosecution lawyer is some big-shot he's never heard of before. He wants to go home and tell Lexie all about it, but he broke her heart so he can't.

...

The prosecution lawyer falls ill the night before the trial begins.

When Mark turns up the next day to try and save an innocent man getting life, the lawyer trying to do the complete opposite is Lexie.

Oh God.

...

He tries to talk to her after the first session. She gives him the cold shoulder.

This isn't just the biggest case of _his_ career.

...

"I didn't think the case was going that badly." Her voice is cold and unforgiving and he swivels in his chair to face her, a frown sliding onto his face. Seeing his face, she slaps a newspaper down on his desk.

The headline reads: WILL THE DAVIDSON TRIAL FALL APART BEFORE IT'S HARDLY EVEN BEGUN?

Mark frowns again, reading the article with a sense of deepening panic.

"You knew it would get a re-trial," Lexie says, her voiced full of anger. "You bastard."

"I didn't tell them," he protests.

"Who the hell did, then Mark?"

"Not me."

She shakes her head in disgust. "The judge wants to talk to us. I take it we both know what he's going to say."

"It might not go to re-trial. We can work together on this."

"Not when our private lives have just been splashed across the papers we can't, Mark."

She walks away then, and he can see any chance of a reconciliation going with her.

...

The judge calls a mistrial and they both lose the case. She blames him, he knows, even though it wasn't him who blabbed to the papers.

Mark can see it in her eyes that he's hurt her even more now.

...

"I put the brief on your desk," she says, calmly. He drops into the chair opposite her desk. "But that's clearly not why you came in here," she adds, sarcastically.

"I miss you."

"Tough luck."

...

She gets offered a job somewhere else, he hears about it from the guy that has the office next to him. He goes to visit her again, to try and talk her out of it.

"Why should I care what you think?" she asks, when he tells her he doesn't think she should take the job.

"Because I care about you," he replies, without missing a beat.

"No, you don't, Mark. The only person you care about is yourself." He turns his head to the side and views her carefully.

"You don't really believe that."

"Yes, I do," she hits back, but he can see the tell-tale signs of tears in her eyes.

"Whatever helps you sleep at night."

...

She takes the job.

...

On her very last day, he goes to her office. It's nearly Christmas, and the rest of chambers is full of decorations and season good cheer, but Lexie's office is littered with cardboard boxes and the atmosphere is muted. There are no decorations in here, not with everything packed neatly away in boxes.

There's a piece of tinsel lying on top of one of the boxes. He picks it up and moves towards her. Mark is certain that she knows he's here, but she doesn't turn. She's staring out the window, at the lightly falling snow, leaning on her desk.

He loops the tinsel around her next and speaks, "Merry Christmas, Lexie." She looks around and their eyes meet.

"Merry Christmas, Mark."

He walks around the desk and sits next to her. Silence descends on them. Neither of them know what to say, so they just sit and watch the snow together.

After a long moment, she speaks. "I'm moving on."

Mark gives her a tight smile.

"So am I."

He reaches an arm around her shoulder, scared that she'll flinch away at his touch. To his surprise, she doesn't and they sit there, her head on his shoulder, his arms around her.

...

Morning comes and Lexie leaves.

...

They never see each other again.

...

_**Seattle - Now**_

It starts with _teach me_.

It ends with _meant to be_.

...

_**Any thoughts? **_


End file.
